Special interview with Paul Kelly

Transcript

plusminus

TRACY BOWDEN, PRESENTER: Paul Kelly is arguably Australia's most celebrated singer-song writer. His body of work contains more than 300 songs, many of which have been covered by other artists, both here and abroad.

Now, at the age of 55, sparked by a concert tour several years ago, Paul Kelly has written a memoir called 'How to Make Gravy', providing the personal stories behind his lyrics and songs from A to Z.

For someone notoriously reluctant to talk about himself and even his music, it's surprising he's opened up to the extent he has in the book. Kerry O'Brien recorded this interview with Paul Kelly in Melbourne on the eve of the memoir being released.

KERRY O'BRIEN, REPORTER: Paul Kelly, you've rarely been one to give much away about yourself. Suddenly we've got more than 500 pages of songs and how they happened and some very personal revelations. What moved you to write it?

PAUL KELLY, SONGWRITER: That's a good question. I don't really know how that happened. It was a book that happened by accident, I guess. It really started off as liner notes for a series of recordings, the 'A to Z' recordings. And at some point I realised,"Ahh, I'm writing a book," and then I realised, "Ohh, it's a memoir." And then ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Then you had to confront how honest you were gonna be, I suppose.

PAUL KELLY: Yeah, I think, yes, you have to sort of think, well, if I'm writing some kind of autobiography, you gotta honour it. There's a certain frankness you have to have. So, that's when it turned into non-fiction. My songs are fiction, but this is something completely different.

KERRY O'BRIEN: There are so many directions we can go in, but I'll start with some of your collaborations. Kev Carmody, with whom you wrote 'From Little Things Big Things Grow' about Vincent Lingiari and the Wave Hill land rights claim. Tell me what drew you to Kev Carmody, "this bull of a man who looked like he was carved in stone," as you describe him?

PAUL KELLY: Yeah, I vividly meeting Kev for first time. We were at the concert in Sydney together. I think it was a rock-for-land rights concert. And his first album, 'Pillars of Society', had just come out. He was - had a really strong presence on stage. He's, you know, spitting out his songs. They were - he had angry songs, political songs, he had these beautiful songs that were hymns to the land. He had all kinds of songs - you know, stories of brothel madams and drovers and drovers wives. And, ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Very powerful.

PAUL KELLY: Yeah. So he had - and one of those great communicators on stage because he would sing and talk. Yeah, so I was drawn to him right from the start.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Archie Roach was another powerful partner on stage for you. The first time you shared a stage with Archie Roach was the Melbourne Concert Hall and you write now that all the hairs of your body stood up. That's when he sang 'They Took the Children Away'.

PAUL KELLY: That's another moment I vividly recall. Again, I hadn't met Archie before that night. I think he had 20 minutes to play and he did two songs. And one of them was 'They Took the Children Away'. And, I was just watching him from the wings and you could just feel it in the auditorium, this electric tension when he sang the song. And when he was finished there was actually a long gap before the applause 'cause I think people were still digesting the song. And so he just finished and he just walked off and he thought - I think he thought that ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: That he'd bombed.

PAUL KELLY: Yeah. And then it just - the applause just started and gathered.

KERRY O'BRIEN: As you travelled and sang with Archie Roach, as his stories poured out in song, you say you could see the toll on him of a thousand little cuts, that the telling was raw for him each time.

PAUL KELLY: Yeah, I mean, Archie was telling me story of - his own story, which is also emblematic story of the Stolen Generations relations, of being taken away from his parents at a very young age. And the record came out in early '90, so there was still a lot of people who were interviewing him for whom this was kind of fresh news. And so that was the thing they always asked about and so that was the thing he had to keep saying and telling.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And in the telling he was reliving it each time?

PAUL KELLY: Yeah, yeah. And I think he still is.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You talk about family quiet often in the book, for obvious reasons. You relate one beautiful song called 'Meet Me in the Middle of the Air' to your mother's death and you'd played Scrabble with her the week before she died and she'd beaten you as usual. You described the family gathered around her as she died and you write, "The minutes ticked on slowly, the gaps between the breaths got longer and longer. There'd be a terrible pause. Is this it? And then the stubborn body would shudder into action again. This went on for a long time." And then you talk about the last pause. "I think of it now and imagine I heard a very soft click like the sounds of somebody walking out of the room and turning off the light." But you observe, "I felt extraordinarily privileged and amazingly high." Not many people would walk away from the death of somebody as close to them describing it that way. I'm intrigued.

PAUL KELLY: I thought it was a privilege to be present at her death with my brothers and sisters. So that was just the way I felt. And it was a high that went on for quite a while. I think a lot of people would experience the same - that same thing when someone dies and the whole family has to get together to organise the funeral. I mean, it was a big funeral because our mother had a big reach and there was a lot of us and we had - we had to divvy up all the jobs and organise transport and food and ceremony and the funeral directors and so on. So all that takes ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: You liken it almost to a Cabinet meeting, with the Minister for Transport and the ...

PAUL KELLY: Yeah. Well there were a series of meetings every day, the meetings about what had to be done. So, all that sort of takes you up. It's also a big gathering of the clan, so which we always like. So, you know, the down came later. But there is a period there when it's just - you felt you've had been present at an extraordinary event.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You're very candid in the book about your period with heroin. You say, "Heroin was the one for me." You single out all the other drugs that were available, but you say, "Heroin was the one for me." It sounds like for a long time you told yourself you could use it, enjoy it, without succumbing to it. Is that right?

PAUL KELLY: Yeah. Well, it was - I had a relationship on and off with heroin for 20 years. Again, as I was saying before, when you - I didn't realise for a while that I was writing a memoir and once I realised I was, I realised certain things had to be spoken about.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Because it was so much a part of your life for that long.

PAUL KELLY: Well a part of my life.

KERRY O'BRIEN: A part of my life.

PAUL KELLY: But my sort of other rough rule of thumb for what stayed in the book and what wasn't was whether it was interesting, whether this particular chapter is an interesting piece of writing. And I thought I had something to say about heroin that was different to the usual narrative. I mean, you hear people - the usual sort of story of heroin is either a tragedy or redemption, you know. You go down with it, you don't get up; or you go down and you come up and you got the redemption story. And I thought there was - I just thought there was another story there.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And what is it?

PAUL KELLY: That, you know, people do use hard drugs recreationally and not all the time, that people can use drugs like heroin without having a habit. I never did. And that, at some point, you weigh up the costs against the benefits and at some point you think, "The costs are getting too much; I'll stop."

KERRY O'BRIEN: And what were the costs in the end for you?

PAUL KELLY: Um ... oh, there's a lot of costs. There's ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: You talk about the fact that towards the end, the coming down, that the coming down was taking much longer, that it was harder to come off it each time. That's the way I read it.

PAUL KELLY: I think it's like most drugs, including alcohol. You know, when you're young you can drink 20 beers in a night and get up the next day and play football. But, you know, I can't drink that much anymore without feeling the effects of it. So it's the same with any kind of drug. I think as you get older, you get - the toll gets - you can't go at it so hard.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But you - whether it was just that heroin was illicit or whether you felt something else about it, felt uncomfortable about it anyway I'm not sure, but for a long time there you were hiding it from others. You hid it from friends and family and colleagues, but you say that after a certain time you knew that they knew, that the - it was becoming obvious to people when you were using heroin.

PAUL KELLY: Yeah, I think - I mean, it's - I don't know whether it's a particular trait of heroin or just other drugs, but I think it is a kind of brainwasher so you sort of think you're getting away with it. And if you have any sorta clarity about it, you start to realise, well, you're not.

KERRY O'BRIEN: I've talked with James Taylor about his experience with heroin. He said that for him it was self-medication for depression, but that in the end it was too narrow, too stultifying. "I felt as though I lived on a postage stamp," he said. Does that ring any bells for you?

PAUL KELLY: Like I said, I think I had a different experience. I didn't ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: So you didn't come to it as a prop, you didn't come to it as an escape. For you it was - you were introduced to it as a recreational drug and that's how you saw yourself using it.

PAUL KELLY: Yeah. For a long time it worked like that.

KERRY O'BRIEN: So have you ever talked to your own kids about that experience? What would you - have you ever said to them, "I'd be relaxed if you tried it," or, "My advice to you is stay away?"

KERRY O'BRIEN: Well then let me put to it you this way: what would you now say to others who might consider using heroin?

PAUL KELLY: Ah, I wouldn't say anything at all. I think the last thing the world needs is pop sinners giving advice.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You're more than a pop singer.

PAUL KELLY: Well I'm certainly not someone who wants to give advice to people I don't know.

KERRY O'BRIEN: How hard was it to walk away from when you did?

PAUL KELLY: Not that hard.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You don't occasionally still miss it?

PAUL KELLY: Not anymore.

KERRY O'BRIEN: Having written the book, how do you feel about it?

PAUL KELLY: It's pretty scary actually. I've never been so sort of keyed up about making something. Maybe, you know, back when I made my very first record, that's the feeling.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You would see yourself as having a lot more songs to come, I would imagine.

PAUL KELLY: I don't know, it's not that certain.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You haven't yet reached a stage where you wake up dreading that you might be coming to the end?

PAUL KELLY: Well that's sorta like that every day as a songwriter. It's not like it's - you don't sort of write a song every day. That was what was so much fun about writing the book. It was - it was sort of - it was a daily - it was like laying bricks every day. You could sort of see it building up and becoming something. Songs aren't like that. They're sort of - you don't know whether you're gonna catch one or not. And once I started writing the book, I didn't write a song. It seems like it was - it seemed like it was flicking a switch from one kind of writing to the other. I haven't written a song in two years except a couple of co-writes with other people and ...

KERRY O'BRIEN: Wow.

PAUL KELLY: ... they pretty much were driving the song.

KERRY O'BRIEN: And are you starting to feel hungry again to get into it again, now that the book's done?

PAUL KELLY: If you'd asked me two years ago, you know, "If you didn't write a song for two years, how would you feel?," I would say, "Oh, I'd be pretty - be feeling pretty antsy about that." You know, 'cause I'll feel useless if I'm not writing.

KERRY O'BRIEN: But you're not feeling antsy?

PAUL KELLY: No, well, you know, the book was - the book's like a one big long blurt, so I think I just need to - I'm happy just to sit for a while ...